Sensing Architecture : Movements of Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.
Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/
Sensing Architecture : Movements of Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.
Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/
Outpost 230323
Drawing, depicting something found through the process of making visible.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
The Luminescence Of Space.
An Archaeological Inquiry Into Drawing.
Correspondences/Reclaiming the drawings.
The Affect and Memory of Drawing.
To interrogate ways of seeing/looking, John Berger.
The world of the creative practitioner promotes conditions, gestures and responses that articulate social, political and other theoretical findings which are all 'present' at the inception of the work.
Colin Renfrew.
The Myth of Butades.
Figure/Ground Relationships.
Theoretical Thought : Diagram and map.
Neo-Sumerian temple plan on clay tablet from c. 2100BC.
The drawing/work may take the form of the result of an act or action carried out at a specific time but which itself does not persist.
Art can be the expression in the material world of a concept, or the transformation into one material form of a structure that exists in another.
Drawing/Substance/Memory/Display.
The artist's creative act, is of a self amongst others.
Material/Thinking Matter.
Drawings mediated by the distance of memory.
Art Works, subtle embodiments, visual markers both spatial and sociological.
Life/Drawing/Figuring It Out.
The Luminescent Dematerialization Of The Subject.
Expressions Of Both Figuration And Abstraction.
Phenomenological approaches to Drawing/Looking/Others.
Demarcation/drawing boundaries/wayfaring/paths on the land, re The Making of Space.
Walking/Movement is quiet literally what made us human.
The walk is a 'mark' laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land. Bipedalism is the precursor to the evolution of a large brain, creative intelligence and language.
Richard Long/Colin Renfrew.
Charles Mausson.
Walking Man, No. 3. 1990.
Oil, crayon, 203.0 x 137.0 cm.
Starting from a subject or a simple figurative form, Charles Maussion sets of like an explorer, in search of unexplored lands, looking for something spiritual. It is through walking/drawing/thinking that one can remain human even while seeking out, and without even knowing it, finding it, or finding yourself in lands which are thousands of light years from our society, whilst nevertheless being very close to it. A calm, a loudness, that is extreme, beautiful.
Robert Combas. 1993.
The simple presence of a figure is sufficient to suggest the unity of the individual in a universe which is patiently observed and precisely apprehended. There is a complete absence of any compositional device suggested within the canvas, all that emanates is a climate of strangeness, serenity and disquiet.
Sophie Dupont. 1995.
The blurring of the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground, so as to capture an atmospheric effect, which sought to approximate the murkiness of visual perception.
The legibility of the photographic image was denied by the process of blurring the image.
Paintings, abstract identities of surface and material, introducing content via a dematerialization, so as to engage in a process of pure vision, pure silence, reincarnated, vibrant, alive.
William Jeffett. 1995.
Drawing on the consciousness and corporeality of others, of figural dissolution of the traditional figure/ground relationships, and fragmentation/blurring of the human form. The contemporary body and its environments are experientially brought into abstracted absences, corporeal traces of visual matter, movement and dissolving/reappearing forms.
Figural Expressions.
Figural dissolution of a nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp.
Stop-motion photography of the human body in motion, Etienne Marey.
Figural, paintings/drawings not as representations of tangible subjects, but as registers of a more abstract range of emotions, as a series of studies, always incomplete and never finished, a work in progress. The nude/ the human body has become mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance/blindness of memory.
Notations.
Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process.
Fred Sandback.
The Drawing Room.
The Secret Theory of Drawing.
Jim Dine.
Figure Drawings, 1975-79.
The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.
John Eldenfield.
Manuel Neri.
Drawings/Relief Sculptures.
Naked To Nude.
Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.
Georg Eisler.
Outpost 240723
The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.
Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.
Relationscapes, Erin Manning.
Propositions of Force/Appetition.
The Work's Diagram.
The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.
Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.
Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.
Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.
Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.
Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s).
The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.
We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.
Erin Manning.
Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment.
Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging.
Organism-Person-Environment
A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.
Fielding how we think-feel.
Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.
A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.
Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.
A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.
Erin Manning.
The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.
For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.
We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.
Actuality is the decision amid potentiality.
A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.
Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.
For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.
A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.
Apparatuses/Diagrams
Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.
In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.
The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.
The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.
Sculpting in Time.
Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.
For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.
Erin Manning.
Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall
Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.
Cultivation Field Research Collage
Geological era 1800.
The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.
The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.
A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'
Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.
Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.
Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared.
Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy
Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman
Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.
From Models to Drawings.
Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments
Filtered Light.
Bioscleave/Blue Particle Cloud/Diagram.
Biosphere/Archipelago : Sun Drawing/Cyanotype
The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.
The Drowned World, JG Ballard.
blueprints, cyanotype, alternative printing processes, light drawings,
precision and indeterminacy, human form, ecology,
environments, contemporary art practice
ARCHITECTURAL Body
An ORGANISM that PERSONS
Gins and Arakawa 2002
Although the human condition is a crisis condition if ever there was one, few individuals and societies act with the dispatch a state of emergency requires. The fact that the human condition is a crises condition gets routinely covered up, with culture invariably functioning to obscure how dire the condition is and to float it as bearable
If organisms form themselves as persons by uptaking the environment, then they involve not only bodies but domains, spheres of activity and influence
Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave
Procedural Architecture/Architectural Body
Gins and Arakawa
The role of architecture as a tool for researching the body-environment towards the implementation of these considerations is paramount
The goal of an experimental teaching and learning space based on architectural procedures would be that the process of design and construction would allow students/staff to rethink, re-imagine and enact the curriculum
An Arakawa and Gins Experimental Teaching Space/A Feasibility Study 2013
Jondi Keane
Contexts:
Practice-based research , Research , Studio practice
Artforms:
Painting , Mixed media , Drawing
Tags:
Bioscleave, Architectural Research, Arakawa and Gins,
cyanotype, diagram, collage, texts, current concerns, contemporary practice
Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral
Shroud
Richard Stillman
Yard and Metre Event, Winchester
As the marks resonated, did they sound true?
Could we tolerate margins of error or latitude?
Is there strength in that built by blue ink?
It is hard to see without certainty.
Why have they flown, gathered, shrouded?
Is the date significant? A memorial?
Or is it white noise reverberating,
striking parallels, refusing focus, insisting?
The shape of the cross is still distinct
but opening out, refusing definition,
never quite caught as an intention,
pinned on dimensions it wants to refuse.
When objects or atmospheres collide energy is transferred, a new force may be created. And, as forensic scientists can attest, when objects touch they exchange traces, each leaves something of itself with the other.
This is why artists enjoy collaborating. Working with another artist can give a jolt of inspiration, a spark of creative thinking, a surge of new skill, the stimulus for a new work. And the experience will leave its mark in some way on each individual’s practice.
The specific ‘collision’ may also result in a work which has its own integrity, which does not belong’ to either party and where their particular contributions merge indistinguishably - in effect fusion takes place.
This is the thinking behind 10 days | Creative Collisions and for The Yard artists and Hyde Writers it was the ideal excuse to come together, to let the shockwaves flow and see what new possibilities emerged. As with all the best creative practice, in science or in art, this has been an experiment, it involved risk, trust and open minds. Whether or not the outcomes are fully resolved they will be filled with potential - and with potency.
Stephen Boyce
Contexts:
Arts in health , Community , Publication , Socially Engaged , Writing
Artforms:
Painting , Performance , Photography , Printmaking , Text
Tags:
Space for Peace, 10 Days, Creative Collisions, Winchester Yard Artists,
Hyde Writers, collaborations. visual art, poetry










Outpost 250924
Research Collage 2015
Disjunction and Event/Architecture In/Between.
The task of the architect is to modulate, orchestrate, or simplify the potential reciprocity, indifference, or conflict that spaces can generate. Most problems in architecture are disjunctive, namely they are multiple, heterogeneous, divergent and even contradictory, involving site, program, budget, schedule, and interest groups, among other factors. All of these contradicting and disjunctive forces eventually contaminate one another. Bernard Tschumi, Notes on Architecture 2010 (unpublished).
Making/Adaptations/Using The Made.
Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.
Organism-Person-Environment
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
Studio Drawings.
On Feeling More Matter than Form.
There is always more of everything than a thing can contain.
Immediate Architectural Experiences.
Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations.
Creating an independent yet meaningful reality, that are direct aesthetic experiences of the real.
Kenzo Tange.
Regaining our experience in a world of mass media culture, regaining a world that is directly lived.
Ann Cline.
Architectural Body/Sited Awareness.
Arakawa and Gins end up pointing to the inseparability and affect of body and surround, for them this inseparability is what gives rise to the architectural body. They write that a person should never be considered apart from her surroundings, that their hypothesis of the Architectural Body/Sited Awareness, announces the indivisibility of seemingly separate fields of bioscleave: a person and an architectural surround, and that the two together give procedural architecture its basic unit of study the architectural body.
This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.
The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found.
Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.
Architecture in Abjection.
Zuzana Kovar.
Relevance/Relation as a way of organizing things through both contingency (philosophy) and metonymy (linguistics).
Relevance has by its nature, wiggle room because things have wiggle room. Because things never quite coincide with how they appear for or how they are used by or interpreted by other things (and possibly even themselves).
What we want to do and how we feel and what we are wanting and feeling about are all mashed together into an ecological awareness.
The Context of Relevance is Structurally Incomplete.
Whenever you want to do something, you always encounter a whole thicket of things that are relevant to what you're wanting to do. This thicket of things creates an explosion of contextualization, and you can't – won't be able to stop it.
Timothy Morton.
An interconnection without an edge or centre called General Economy.
Bataille.
Architecture and Material Practice
Katie Lloyd Thomas.
Susannah Hagan argues for a return to a cyclic model where matter is only ever reformed and make (or adapt) architecture accordingly – but without necessarily returning to old forms of building. In a responsible future, architects may have to relinquish their role as form givers, and 'grow' materials rather than give them shape.
Social imperatives and new technologies may well, finally, be the undoing of the grip that hylomorphism has held on architectural and material practices for so long.
Caryatids/Project Spaces.
Architectural Surrounds.
Studio Floor Drawing/Painting.
Mattering/Of and For the Body of Others.
Material Worlds : Frottage, charcoal, wax, Indian Ink, crayon on water.
Material and buildings are always implicated, in and of the world. In discussing her work with a group of African women who are beginning the process of making their own homes, Doina Petrescu asks how their principle of 'putting together and sharing' might be realized in an architectural project.
The specificities of place, culture, gender and local forms of negotiation make an 'architecture' that is more fluid than solid, and more matter than form, and demonstrate the radical alterity of building in another context.
Architecture in Abjection.
Organism-Person-Environment
Human bodies and spaces flow through one another – a chemical indiscernibility that is invisible.
Two of the most fundamental things that come out of the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins for architecture, in mapping out a more open-ended and volatile understanding of bodies and spaces, are the reduction of these to matter and a thinking in terms of relations or events rather than static and discrete entities. These link directly into the area of process and intelligent material philosophy that is at the forefront of this thinking, and that is employed here, namely through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to approach abject(ion) productively.
What the introduction of abject(ion) and a reading of it through the filter of Deleuze and Guattari allows for and contributes on top of its own way of reworking dualities is a bringing together of the material and processual approaches already in play within the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins, respectively. It is with this in mind that we move to the Kristevan concept.
The Hot Death. 2006.
Philippe Rahm.
Rahm's work has a very particular quality. There is almost no building, which is usually the measure or ground of architecture. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, coder and effect of architecture itself.
Physiological/Meteorological Architecture operates across fields of art, architecture and science. Rahm through his spaces, manipulates temperature, oxygen and hormone levels. Importantly, as his works straddle this range of fields, it frees up the architecture, allowing it to be distilled down to its effects and to experience.
An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space. It begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion). It becomes about a visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject.
This extracorporeal space, especially in contemporary man, consists of filling to the point of overflow where the subject is ensnared, a condition of the state of stress and an endemic breach of adaptation.
The Hot Death is a choreography piece that investigates the indiscernibility of the body and space at a chemical level. A levelling between body and space occurs, where the temperature of the space slowly comes to equal that of the living body, stabilising the two and eliminating their differences: a play on death.
The bodies are on stage at the start of the order of individuality, each with its own movements, independently of others, as a multitude of energy. Then gradually, the temperature, humidity of the room rises to match that of the human body. The movements are slower, heavier, gravity wins put up any ground, motionless, without more space between, more movement possible.
Body and space are at the fundamental level of a base materialism, merely matter, and that because of this, 'can wind quintets carry and spread the flu virus?' such exchanges are possible.
Raum's work moves away from an architecture that is constituted by body and space to an architecture that is the active exchange between body and space. It is in this understanding – that bodily and spatial boundaries are not clearly demarcated as architecture still generally assumes them to be, and that they regularly are transgressed and diluted – that constitutes a move beyond dualistic modes of thought.
Outpost 111023
What we have to remember is that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our means of questioning it.
Werner Heisenberg.
Fields of Care.
The metaphor of the container and the contained that has guided Western thought with its vocabulary of inert matter, fragmentation, and frozen and petrified movement has crippled the architectural imagination for over two millennia.
Architecture Is A Verb, Sarah Robinson. 2021
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
Drawing Projects.
An exploration of the language of drawing.
Mike Maslen, Jack Southern. 2011
The Eye That Feels.
We must learn to think with our feelings and feel with our thoughts.
Towards A Feeling Response.
Human beings are lumps of perceptions in a state of flux, and 'being' is a constantly changing state of infinite variety. Drawings are made by human beings and like their makers, they can be complex, somewhat vulnerable, unresolved, and imperfect. Equally, they can be confident, measured, controlled, well understood and decisive.
A drawing is a lexis of marks that represent and describe what our eyes see, and to some extent what our minds/bodies know and feel. It is made by the co-ordination of the eye/brain/hand/medium, and arranged in an organised and cohesive way to form a visual description/illusion. It is a trail of contained energy, incorporating the history of its own making, and recorded through a passage of time. It is an approximate attempt at depicting a perceived truth, and will have been made in either a confident, cautious, well seen, well understood, generalised, decisive, indecisive, 'right', or 'wrong'way.
We live in an age when computer generated reprographic processes provide us with a world of 'technological perfection' and 'high definition'.Three-dimensional imagery offers limited, but enhanced and often 'super-real',virtual reality. It is a time in which the large flat TV screen is providing our children with replacement substitutes for what might to a previous generation have been exposed to, and an active involvement with, an experience of rich sensory pre-verbal childhood play. It is more important than ever that, in this world of 'perfect reproduction', our children do not literally get 'out of touch' with their senses, and that a drawing retains its value as a unique, hand-made object, which contains and expresses qualities that are as individual and special as its creator.
The Body/Corporeality of Drawing.
Seeing/Becoming/Situatedness
The process of making is a magical act, organic and physiological.
The drive to create a cosmos originated in the magic structure of consciousness.
All basic physical and mechanical laws, such as leverage, traction, bearing, adhesion, all constructions such as the labyrinth, the vault, all such technical achievements or discoveries are pre-given to us. Every invention is primarily a rediscovery and an imitative construction of the organic and physiological.
The Ever Present Origin, Jean Gebser. 1984
All arts we must remember, are phases of the social mind. We are in the habit of thinking of them in terms of art products that we forget that the arts themselves are groups of ideas and acquisitions of skill, that exist in the minds, muscles and nerves of living human beings.
Franklin Henry Giddings. 1914
The earliest buildings are grown, they are woven structures. Borne of gathering around a fire and weaving walls.
Understanding Building as Weaving.
Gottfried Semper.
Architecture is a verb outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice.
It acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment.
It understands human actions in terms of radical embodiment, grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition, imagining, thinking, remembering, in the body.
It asks what a building does, that is it extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, and how they shape thought and action.
It is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human building interactions.
Sarah Robinson. 2021
Homo Faber.
Architecture shapes ideas, ideas are born through the act of forming.
Thinking and making have traditionally been relegated to two different domains and like architecture and building the former is privileged over the latter.
Seldom do we consider the act of making as a method of knowing. For Tim Ingold, both the maker and the theorist are engaged in processes of knowledge, with the important difference that the craftsman thinks through making, while the theorist imposes thought on matter.
The temple at once embodied the interdependent arising of craft and community, and replaced the caves and sacred groves of earlier divine appearances, to become a place apart.
A crafted place where divinity was revealed. The world appeared for the first time through something people made. Through building the temple, cosmos was discovered through making.
The top-down abstract knowing of the theorist verses the bottom-up embodied knowing of the craftsman has come to define our hierarchy on the valuation of knowledge.
The Origins of Architecture in Weaving.
They Wove Their Walls.
Vitruvius.
Tim Ingold comments that just as baskets are woven, so buildings are grown, not built. Their form, and its usefulness emerges from the process of growth rather than from the mandates of a preconceived design on formless raw material.
Materials are not understood in terms of their component parts, but in terms of what they do.
Making is not a matter of imposition, but of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material.
Cyanotype processing of architectural drawings.
Blackboard/Whiteboard Fragments.
Organism/Person/Environment.
DSC_2068 Structured Modalities : Rules/Individual Resources
Braking down research.
Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.
Re-combinent poetics/praxis.
The Architectural Scriptorium
The Photographic Darkroom.